Manufacturing operations or plants will often include conveyor systems for moving parts from one location to another. At each location, the parts may be machined or subject to similar operations, inspected, assembled painted or packaged among other operations. The smooth operation of the plant is dependent on the timing of each of the operations to which a part may be subjected. For example if a particular machine processes parts at a certain rate, the next stage of the operation, ideally, should also process those parts at the same rate. Otherwise, the faster machine's operations will have to be stopped to allow the slower machine to process the parts.
There are many times, however, when a particular upstream portion of a process is faster than the downstream portion of the process due to inherent limitations in the downstream process. For example, in some situations a particular part needs to be inspected after it is processed. Human inspection can be much slower than an upstream machine-based process. Therefore, additional workers will have to be employed to undertake the inspection so as not to adversely affect the rate of manufacture. Therefore, a multitude of conveyance pathways may be needed to accommodate the workers. There are other situations where the output of a portion of a process needs to be split into two or more lines. One such situations may be to accommodate a slower downstream process.
There are a wide variety of methods which have been used to accomplish the task of conveyor splitting. Some involve the use of high speed robot arms which are cable of grasping and placing parts on different conveyor pathways. Others involve the use of complex perpendicular conveyor belt patterns which may be raised and lowered with respect to one another.
The main disadvantage of prior art conveyor assemblies is their complexity and the difficulty of constructing such conveyor systems. In addition, many systems are not suited to transporting large stamped parts with protruding sharp points and tabs. These protrusions may get caught in roller systems. In many situations, for example in the auto industry, the use of complex conveying for the transport of large stamped parts is actually accomplished with manual labour. The auto workers in such situations will often simply grab the parts from the output conveyor and manually transfer them to the two receiving conveyors. These systems are fraught with risk of physical danger and possible damage of the parts. The present invention provides an effective means of transferring manufactured articles from an output lane into two or more receiving lanes.